UPDATE: Diversity on the American Stage (6/12/06; 6/24/06)

The English Department at Carnegie Mellon University and Unseam'dShakespeare Company (Pittsburgh, Pa) with the participation of the AugustWilson Center for African American Culture invite academics, artists andgraduate students to participate in a day-long symposium:

Bridges or Fences: Diversity on the American Stage(Re-engaging the Wilson-Brustein Debates)

June 24, 2006Carnegie Mellon UniversityPittsburgh, Pa

It has been a decade since playwright August Wilson's address during theTheatre Communications Group conference sparked a debate with RobertBrustein, founding director of Yale and American Repertory Theatres.Engaged from a podium at Princeton, the debate raged in the pages ofAmerican Theatre, and finally was staged at New York's Town Hall (moderatedby actress/activist Anna Deveare Smith). This debate placed in stark reliefthe politics of representation that play out on stages across America, andposed challenging questions about diversity, democracy and thepossibilities of American theatre to support either.

On June 24, 2006 a day-long symposium will be convened to address thecentral question of the Wilson-Brustein debate:

What does/can/should diversity look like on the stage?

Presented in conjunction with the Unseam'd Shakespeare Company's productionof Othello: Noir, the symposium asks participants to re-engage theWilson-Brustein debate or its concerns, welcomes them to engage in adiscussion with artists, artistic directors, and academics fromPittsburgh's arts community, and invites them to attend a production thatengages these concerns in performance. The day will include presentationsby academics and artists, live performances, a community picnic, andconclude with a community conversation among symposium attendees and thedirectors from Pittsburgh's professional, nonprofessional, small and largetheatre companies.

In addition to re-engaging the Wilson-Brustein debates, the symposium takesup a conversation convened in 2004 by the August Wilson Center for AfricanAmerican Culture in Pittsburgh, Pa. This conversation--"DiversityRevisited," convened during the National Performing Arts PresentersConference-- included many arts organizations from Pittsburgh in aconversation with a decidedly national focus on the question of diversityin the performing arts generally. During the symposium on June 24, thoseinvolved in the "Diversity Revisited" conversation have been invited tocontinue their conversation. Thus, the symposium presents the opportunityto continue the work started in 2004 while at the same time advancing andexpanding the conversation. The symposium will involve more localstakeholders and provide them the opportunity to engage the symposiumparticipants in conversation with a focus on the specific issues related todiversity initiatives in theatre and dance performance.

Please submit an abstract (250 words) or paper addressing the following (orrelated questions):>If American theatre changed in response to the Wilson-Brustein debates,did it do so in response to or rejection of the positions of Wilson andBrustein?>What do performance theory, cultural studies, and theatre scholarship haveto say about the possibilities for diversity on the American stage?>What is at stake in practices of "color-blind" casting>What is the difference between colorblind and multicultural casting?>How do ideas about audiences and "what they want" shape our decisionsabout casting?>What authority does the text have when it comes to casting?>Are their other spaces of representation outside multicultural orcolorblind casting?>If theatre provides a "liminal" space of possibility, what does theWilson-Brustein debate suggest about the boundaries of this liminal space?>How do the above questions change when we are discussing the casting oftheatrical classics from the European tradition?. . . When we are discussing commercial vs. non-profit, big or smalltheatres?. . . When we are discussing theatre training?